Wednesday Apr 24, 2013

You don’t like
losing control – that is human nature. In your personal life or professional –
whether you are an IT architect, a manager, developer, a DBA or an executive,
you never like losing control or not knowing a situation or an outcome. But a
cloud deployment is exactly that – where you don’t have a 100% control over or
insight into the security framework that govern your applications or data in
the cloud.

The problem is
further exacerbated with latency and fragmentation. If it is not the same
security policies that govern your enterprise infrastructure and your cloud
deployment, duplicating security policy data in multiple places will complicate
policy enforcement. Fragmentation, in turn, creates latency where a change in
the system is not detected or acted upon immediately making your cloud systems
vulnerable. If, for example, your employee changes jobs, unless the HR system
is immediately able to trigger a revocation alert/workflow across all the
applications and systems – both in-house and in the cloud, you may have
inadvertently allowed unauthorized (and potentially damaging) access to your
applications and data.

Of course, then
there is audit and compliance. If you are a financial institution your cloud
has to provide reporting to address the BASEL 2 requirements or you will incur
financial penalties.If your cloud hosts
your General Ledger – your cloud has to provide Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) certification.
If your customers are in Europe, your cloud has to comply with the European
data privacy directive. How do organizations, such as yours, provide timely
compliance reporting and remediation if you don’t have visibility or if recent
actions aren’t immediately recorded. Fragmentation and latency, thus, impact
audit and compliance reporting. Simply put, if you don’t know about it, you
can’t accurately report on it.

So, if
fragmentation and latency are the issues, a standardized platform must be the
antidote! Having a complete, standardized security and identity management
platform will allow you to enforce uniform security policies across all your
resources – on-premise or hosted. A platform approach implies seamless
integration within components thereby getting rid of security and identity
silos. A platform approach implies interoperability so that the framework works
for your complete heterogeneous infrastructure. A platform approach affords
scalability- you can support thousands or millions of users across the myriad
of resources. You can scale to what the new digital experience requires!

Thanks to Oracle’s
large and advanced customer base, the company realized the rationale for the
platform approach to Security and Identity Management early on. Oracle offers the
industry’s first Identity Management platform that is proven to be extensible
enough to support your internet scale.

Learn more about
Oracle’s platform approach to Identity Management and how you can leverage
Identity services at internet scale. Download
the free whitepaper today.